Healing The Family Tree

Healing the Family Tree (1987) by Kenneth McAll (Sheldon Press)
ISBN: 9780859695329 | Condition: Good | Sold by Crappy Old Books

Every family has a history. Some families have a legend. And some families have a collection of half-remembered stories that begin with “We don’t talk about that” and end with someone dramatically changing the subject to the weather. Healing the Family Tree steps calmly into this exact British emotional minefield and says, in effect: Right then. What if the past isn’t finished with you? What if it’s still ringing the bell and asking to come in?

Kenneth McAll’s book is one of those fascinating, earnest works from the late twentieth century that takes a long, serious look at generational inheritance — not the nice kind involving antique sideboards and suspicious teaspoons, but the invisible kind: patterns, burdens, griefs, unresolved trauma, and the strange way certain troubles seem to echo down a lineage like a tune nobody remembers starting. McAll approaches this through a spiritual and pastoral lens, suggesting that healing can involve acknowledging what came before, naming it, praying into it, and (in the best sense) refusing to pretend it isn’t there.

This is not a cosy “trace your ancestors and feel wholesome” guide. It’s more like a careful torchlight tour of the shadowy corners of family history — the locked rooms, the missing pages, the inherited silences. McAll writes with a calm authority that feels part counsellor, part priest, part compassionate detective. He’s not interested in blaming Grandma for everything (tempting though that may be). He’s interested in the possibility that understanding and spiritual attention can loosen knots that have been tied for decades.

If that sounds heavy, it can be — but there’s also something quietly liberating about a book that gives you permission to consider that your family’s weird recurring dramas might not just be “how we are,” but something that can be faced, processed, and softened. In other words: this is a book that treats your family as a living organism rather than a set of awkward holiday obligations. It invites you to look for meaning, to recognise wounds, and to consider reconciliation not as a sentimental “let’s all get along,” but as deliberate work.

And it’s from 1987, which adds an extra layer of charm: before therapy-speak went mainstream, before everyone was “setting boundaries” on Instagram, here is a thoughtful, faith-based attempt to articulate something many people feel but struggle to name. It’s a little time capsule of pastoral psychology — serious, humane, and not remotely interested in quick fixes.

Condition is Good, which feels appropriate for a book like this: it has likely been read with a pencil nearby and a lot of quiet thinking between chapters. Ideal for anyone interested in spiritual healing, family systems, generational patterns, or simply the nagging suspicion that Uncle Derek didn’t invent the family atmosphere all by himself.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — where the past is always on the shelf, and sometimes, surprisingly, it comes with a way forward.

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